This is great news (great stuff in the thread as to why, too):

Woohoo! Chickenpox vaccines are on the menu in the UK - finally!! www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

This blogpost, by my friend Sam on his trip to Taiwan, is so interesting about many little tidbits of Taiwanese culture. Highly recommended for all Wikipedia rabbit hole diggers. open.substack.com/pub/thefitzw...

There are actually many more things you can point to as examples of recent scientific breakthroughs www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-br... than 'curing Alzheimer's in mice', which people have been claiming to have done for decades and has a tenuous connection to what happens in humans.

You can also use the map in the story to look up vaccination rates in your local schools! This was a HUGE data lift: we reviewed and mapped tens of thousands of individual schools’ data, assembling the most comprehensive public database. And we published this data here: github.com/washingtonpo...

A superb summary of why our investment in fundamental science fuels stunning advances in medical treatments 🧪

Found a solution to the masquerade mask/glasses problem 🤣

You have less than a day to read this before it expires! 💨

Got a gym session in there before the New Year's Resolution crowd of people 😌

Well, I've become a mother.

In addition to my 10% Pledge, I just sent in an end of year donation for some errors in my writing (totaling £85). They included a few errors I caught and fixed, a 'major' coding error in a chart (bsky.app/profile/scie...), and some minor ones that others spotted but didn't want to be paid for.

What a time to be alive! "22 women became the first to receive mitochondrial donation to replace the mitochondrial DNA in their eggs, and have had 8 live births so far. They carried mutations that could have otherwise caused potentially fatal inherited metabolic diseases in their children"

Really encouraging to read. Highly recommended if you need a mood booster before the new year.

having spent a while watching this I would say that it was at its absolute funniest on the seventh, maybe eighth replay

The more I hear about my friends' young kids, the less surprised I am that kids catch so many infections. Sadly it is a bit gross as well. What do you mean your kid is eating soil and drinking bathwater?

New post! There was a lot of innovation in medicine and biomedical research this year, and I've tried to summarize the biggest ones in this blogpost. Medical breakthroughs in 2025. Plus a serious note at the end. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-br...

Really encouraging to see siRNA therapies enter the mainstream. A sobering reminder of how long this stuff takes to get to the clinic, though - here's me writing about their promise (and what you'd need to deliver them) in 2005 softmachines.org?p=143

This is great. Amazing positive developments in 2025. Nightingale's law: "if you aren't interested in pharmaceutical innovation, at some point in your life you will be"

New post! There was a lot of innovation in medicine and biomedical research this year, and I've tried to summarize the biggest ones in this blogpost. Medical breakthroughs in 2025. Plus a serious note at the end. www.scientificdiscovery.dev/p/medical-br...

Since it's the holidays, you'll finally have time to catch up Hard Drugs episodes! Here's a thread of all of them so far:

I don't get why the baby is on the list instead of the doctors who treated him

There's a tiny lizard in my parents' bathroom!!! I am calmly pretending it doesn't exist and letting it continue with its way of life

Rawls: consider the impossibility of knowing in advance— GWWC: skill issue

Philosophers: Imagine yourself behind the veil of ignorance, not knowing what life you might be born into Giving What We Can: But what if we unveiled it

Watching my favourite Christmas movie

me: i can’t find my kindle anywhere 6yo niece: did you check in my room

Very interesting. name-age-calculator.randalolson.com

I've decided these are much better than regular flowers, because they don't need to be watered and never die

I started listening to this and already have learned more about livers than I ever knew before.

If you have a long drive or flight coming up, I recommend our latest Hard Drugs episode! The story of developing the hep B vaccine is wild, and it was very fun to record. This episode also contains the most swearing.

The hepatitis B vaccine is amazing. It was the first viral protein subunit vaccine, the first recombinant vaccine, AND the first vaccine to prevent a type of cancer. That's right: we've had a cancer vaccine for over 40 years. Our new three-hour episode of Hard Drugs is all about it:

Hep B vaccines have been in the news recently, as the ACIP under RFK Jr voted to withdraw universal newborn vaccination. We recorded most of this episode before that happened, so we added more thoughts about why that's concerning, before explaining how special and awesome Hep B vaccines are:

So far this is the Hard Drugs episode I personally learned most from while recording. Some holiday listening for those of you traveling this week (I’m headed to the airport in 30 mins…). Fun to record 8 episodes this year. With that, signing off for 2025! ✌️

The hepatitis B vaccine is amazing. It was the first viral protein subunit vaccine, the first recombinant vaccine, AND the first vaccine to prevent a type of cancer. That's right: we've had a cancer vaccine for over 40 years. Our new three-hour episode of Hard Drugs is all about it:

I have to say, I'm a fan of bands that have straightforward names

"Across the highest adult performance, peak performance is negatively correlated with early performance" Is uite literally what you'd see if coliderbias:

You know what I like? Telling people my favourite things about London are: how much open space there is, how people are quite relaxed and friendly here, and that the air is fresh and the weather is good. And watching their facial expression go from confused to thinking they're being trolled...

First time I've come across a dataset that is down for Christmas... ☃️

Oliver Sacks admitted his case studies in The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat were fraudulent “fairy tales”. What Psych101 core texts are left? www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Playing poker* was not allowed at my school, so I mostly find this article confusing. *or any card game that could be vaguely construed as being related to gambling, including bridge.

Lots of wisdom about how to do good dataviz in this piece by @scientificdiscovery.dev substack.com/inbox/post/1...

You remember that Nature Aging paper about how multilingualism protects against accelerated aging? Well…

Has anyone invented airbags for people falling over yet? Like, I'd like my clothing to turn me into the Michelin man if I was about to hit hard ground.

One of my favourite review genres

Really enjoyed this post by Henry Oliver about Jane Austen as an inventor of the modern novel, a moral educator and, I think, a genius

Browsing some jazz sheet music books when I come across a review that says "some don't sound good without the jazz tempo"

Amazed to learn that I mixed up Paul Ehrlich and Linus Pauling in a draft, probably simply because both have the name Paul somewhere.

Special note to economists: It can’t start with “Your methods were so bad it inspired me to never…”

I was trying to explain to my brother that statins don't carry a risk of cognitive side effects, when he (correctly) pointed out that there was a box label suggesting that they do. What's the backstory here? Why do they have that warning?

In Beasley's classic paper on the risk of liver cancer from hep B: He followed up thousands of people in Taiwan with hepatitis B surface antigen, and found they had a 223x higher risk of developing primary hepatocellular carcinoma (95% CI: 28-1497x) pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC...